March is meat-free month; for me it’s a month of veganism. I’ve eaten way too much cheese over winter, and ignored my own foodie morals too. Meat has meant comfort and easy cooking, and dinner has been lacklustre. Now, I’ve got spring and bright clean air and a fresh, complex approach to food. We’re moving out of our mouldy, dark house by the end of the month; since everything in the kitchen is covered in plaster dust and we spend so much time cleaning there’s little joy to be had cooking, I really can’t wait.

It’s so exciting learning to cook new things; I had completely forgotten the thrill of planning a meal that was different and demanding. Yesterday was a root vegetable gratin with mushroom and onion gravy and polenta-crusted smoked tofu. This morning was quinoa porridge, lunch will be a burrito full of TVP chilli, guacamole and maybe even some evil soy cheese. Exciting, fun, and delicious.

The winter blues got me bad this year. My amazing job has been very hard work, and in our house the kitchen decided the hallway was having all the fun. Cue dripping, then leaking, then a full-on gush of water pouring through the ceiling.

The ceiling caved in, covering everything in plaster and water. Good point: the leak was from a water and a gas pipe rubbing together, and it was the gas pipe that leaked. Bad point: no light, no ceiling. Kitchen covered in plaster. Landlord throwing a genuinely impressive tantrum at the idea of reducing our rent.

A month later and we are still cooking without a proper light – ever tried chopping onions lit only by a string of fairy lights? The kitchen is dark, gloomy and deeply uninspiring.

Today, however, I woke up with the house to myself. I wandered downstairs, browsed some blogs for breakfast ideas ( Orangette, I am feeling the breakfast love), and decided I was going to have to make something up.

Cue fat sweet-dough rolls with an egg, and sugar, and melted butter, wrapped round lovely vegetarian sausages and brushed with a butter sugar crisp.

I baked them for about 30 minutes, and they’re amazing – light, fluffy, crisp and only lightly sweet. I ate two despite them being huge. I don’t want to jinx it, but I might be back.

There is daylight on the garden, the snow has cleared. My kitchen is full of amazing presents: a silicone loaf tin, a beautiful blue Le Creuset pestle and mortar, a blue Hairy Bikers tagine.

It has occurred to me how much I have neglected my kitchen. I have been crazily busy, crawling home dog tired and curling up in bed only to roll out and back into work again the next day, and the next. Food has been mostly necessity, though I made Christmas bread and cinnamon rolls for my team for Christmas Eve.

So my challenge is this: one cook book recipe a week, every week, without fail. That could be anything, from cookies to cheesecake, mains, starters, drinks or snacks. With that recipe, a blog post. That means at least once a week I will make a pot of tea, tie my hair back, put on some music and spend time to myself in the kitchen.

It sounds like a good resolution to me.

I am fairly settled in a new house with marvellous housemates. Our shower pours through the ceiling, and everywhere we move is full of boxes. It’s rather humbling seeing your whole life packed up, I’d forgotten.

I’m getting used to early mornings, smelling of Lush all the time (mmm), being glittery a lot and, oddly, having a massive team. They’re wonderful, batty and passionate and funny and clever, and I’m thoroughly enjoying work.

At home, I’m learning my way round a gas oven (oh hellooooooooooooo, sexy gas hob), the oven’s a bit under temp but I’ve just turned out a perfect loaf so I feel like I know my way round it now.

My first big project with the oven was pumpkin pie. No recipe as it was all a bit ad-hoc, a little onion squash roasted with butter, then mashed with maybe 200g soft light brown sugar, 300ml buttermilk, two eggs and poured into a blind-baked sweet shortcrust pastry case. Baked for an hour and a half on a medium gas mark, though it turns out my oven is maybe a gas mark below what it should be.

Things aren’t perfect, but I’m roasting pumpkins and sharing wine with my lovely housemates, working with a brilliant team and about to embark on a very exciting PhD.

I love to bake, it’s like creating your own little atmosphere. If only I had a magic crab…

I fall in love a lot. I fall head over heels for songs, for scents, for tastes. I will spend a week eating almost exclusively freshly baked bread, or foods containing peanut butter. I will spend a whole day inhaling next to a freshly cut bunch of sweet peas, until, as sweet peas do, they suddenly crumple into a dry shiver of falling petals. I’m a hedonist, and a romantic too.

I fall for boys. Preferably, boys with brains and issues. It really is only a matter of time before I’m declaring my love for a zombie.

Usually my falling in love goes like this: meet boy. Fall for boy. Flirt, between moments of crippling insecurity. Discover boy has a girlfriend/isn’t interested/is actually entirely unsuitable. Cry, get drunk, bake, cry, sing, get over it.

I met a boy, who I already knew like the back of my hand, a boy I first met on September 11th 2001. Somewhere between that day and this, we’d started to fit like jigsaw pieces.  We kissed and all sorts of things that had been fizzing around inside me fell gently into place. He went to ground.

He begged my forgiveness, I forgave him. We kissed some more. He already knew what I liked to read, I knew what made him shiver (and there’s less difference between those things than you might expect, being bookish types). I let all my defences down, enjoyed the quietness of being happy.

I haven’t heard from him in weeks. My friends expect me to be angry, while I’m waiting for the day when all I can do is cry to Imogen Heap. Instead I’m sort of floating by, managing everything all the same. It’s not lost on me that as I move one step closer to crazycatladydom, this little guy has befriended me.

So I’m enjoying the first days of autumn alone. Today my dear, silly friends collected me and we went to look at houses. I’m looking forward to living with them, though I suspect I may quickly become their kitchen wench. The leaves are starting to turn and the sunlight is low and crisp. We’re alternating between gusty wind and streaming rain, and bright Indian Summer days. My chilli pepper is flourishing in the hot, low light.

Autumn promises spice and warmth, and nothing evokes them for me like pumpkin recipes. Cinnamon, eggs, butter, sugar, and pumpkin. I start work tomorrow, so a batch of pumpkin cupcakes with cinnamon icing, and for the vegan staff vegan chocolate cupcakes with chocolate buttercream frosting (also vegan, of course).

I baked while watching Julie and Julia. It was as delightful as I’d hoped. A lazy Sunday, with a lovely film, ginger tea, and a busy kitchen.No recipes for this update, because I used cookbooks instead of making it up or cobbling it together. Miracles do happen.

My cupcakes are from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. A brilliant cookbook that’s strangely ill-suited to the kitchen: my copy has fallen apart, the pages can’t cope with wet surfaces and the spine with being held open. I made only one small change, using chocolate soy milk instead of plain, because I wanted a really deeply-flavoured chocolatey cupcake.

The frosting is the Hummingbird Bakery chocolate frosting, but using Pure margarine, which is vegan. Vegan cupcakes tend to be a little frustrating – the sugar rises to the top making a lovely crisp top, while the cake itself can be very delicate and stick to the case. These ones are a little more robust, and the frosting is perfect – I’ve used 100g less icing sugar and double the cocoa. Hedonist, you see.

The pumpkin cupcakes were less straightforward. The pumpkin I had was frozen uncooked, in chunks. I used the Hummingbird Bakery recipe, adapting it because (stupidly, in my humble opinion) all the recipes ask for a food mixer. I always use their quantities but a traditional method – cream butter and sugar, add eggs and any other liquids, then add dry ingredients, mix briefly and pour into cases.

For these cupcakes, I needed to puree the pumpkin. I roasted it in the 40g butter required for the recipe. My blender is a disaster, almost completely useless. It needs a lot of liquid to produce a smooth puree, so I blended the eggs and milk with the roasted cooled pumpkin and the sugar. The thick, deep golden custard, coloured by molasses-y soft sugar and the pumpkin, was almost enough to make me run out and buy cream and make pie.

I stirred in a generous amount of vanilla paste (my current favourite ingredient), and plenty of cinnamon, plus a shake of mixed spice. I love the warmth, and depth, of spiced baked goods but strangely hate buying the same foods – I think it’s the way it all tastes the same, as though everything contains the same amount of generic mixed spice and raisins (always raisins). The Pioneer Woman calls vanilla seeds vanilla caviar. One taste of this thick, black vanilla paste will tell you why. It really is that special, a dark, sexy, headily scented syrup.

They rose unpredictably, but they are delicious, spiced and creamy and gently elastic – more like muffins than cupcakes. I’ve topped them with the simplest icing, just icing sugar, cinnamon and water, made thick and dolloped on top to dribble messily down the sides.

You can find my cooking playlist on Spotify

I have other reasons to be happy – my 15, 000 word dissertation is submitted, and I have a new job, as manager at the Preston Lush store. I couldn’t be more excited. I was a sales assistant at Preston when it first opened; I worked there for a year, then at both the central Manchester stores as a graduate intern, then a brief stint over Christmas at Southampton before taking over the Bolton store.

I left Lush to do my MA, having agonised over whether I could combine a full-time postgrad and 40 hours a week in the shop. I decided I couldn’t, but I’m doing my PhD part time, so Preston here I come! Autumn and winter at Lush are the best time – Halloween and Christmas products, glitter, foam, laughter, and being constantly, madly busy.

I start next week, so this week and last I’ve been pampering myself: enjoying the last of the summer sun, reading books that have been waiting for me to be free of my dissertation, and pottering about in the kitchen. Coming home from tea in the lovely Mystery Tea House with a carrier bag stuffed full of bramley apples, I was inspired to get all autumnal in the kitchen.

I’ve made these cinnamon rolls from Dianne’s Dishes a few times, and some searching for ‘pecans’ on foodblogsearch.com gave me inspiration to mix it up a bit. These are not diet food – some are going to have to go in the freezer for fear I get into the shop and my arteries spontaneously clang shut, cutting short my dreams of a Lush Christmas. They’re perfect with strong coffee; buttery caramel oozes over crisp pecans and soft, fluffy cinnamon bread.

I added mixed dried fruit to these but think they would actually have been better without it. If you really fancy some, sprinkle generously over the cinnamon.

Ingredients

1/2 cup brown sugar
50g butter
1/2 cup pecans, finely chopped
dessertspoon golden syrup or maple syrup (I used maple flavour golden syrup because I’m a pervert)

1 1/2 cups warm water
1/2 cup golden or light brown sugar
2 tablespoons dried yeast
1 tsp salt
4ish cups white bread flour

50g butter
tablespoon cinnamon
tablespoon brown sugar

25g butter

Oil a 20cmish cake tin, and preheat the oven to 150.

In a pan, melt together your butter and sugar until the sugar has all melted. I used Chinese block sugar which made for a lovely crunchy finish, but normal is fine.

Add the golden/maple syrup, boil briefly and pour into the base of the cake tin.

Sprinkle evenly with the pecans and set aside, if your kitchen is big enough to have an ‘aside’. If not, work round it and be prepared for a few heart-in-mouth moments when, with both hands buried in dough, you somehow manage to catch it as it tumbles, slow motion, towards the floor.

A word about yeast – this recipe specifies dried yeast. If you’re using fast-action yeast, or the magic Dove’s stuff, it is worth checking proportions. The packet should tell you how much you need in comparison to plain old dried yeast. In a large mixing bowl, stir together your warm water (tap warm is fine), yeast and sugar, and leave until it foams gently.The smell of yeast is one of my favourite kitchen smells, promising soft, fluffy dough.

Add the salt. Gradually add the flour, stirring until you have a smooth fine dough, then knead briefly (1-2 mins) until you have a soft, elastic dough.

On a well-floured surface, roll out the dough to a large rough rectangle, max 2cm thick. Melt the 50g butter in the microwave, and brush gently to cover the dough.

Sprinkle over the cinnamon and sugar, and gently roll to press together. Roll the dough up along the long side, so you get a long sausage of sugar-filled dough.

Using a bread knife, slice the log into lengths of 6-8cm (3inches), and place with one cut side down onto the caramel.

Don’t try and pack them tight, they need space to rise. Melt the 25g butter and brush the tops gently.

Cover with a damp teatowel or oiled clingfilm, and leave to rise in a warm place for 30 minutes.

Once risen the dough is very delicate. Carefully place into the oven, and bake for 20-25 minutes until golden brown on top. Turn the cake tin quickly upside down onto a large plate. If your cake tin has a loose bottom, push gently downwards until the rolls hit the plate. Slide the tin away then use a palette knife to gently release the base.

Resist the urge to bury your face in the caramel as it’s still scorching hot. Leave to cool for ten minutes, or as long as you can stand, before easing away a roll and making scoffing happy noises.

I am not going to do the recipes because, frankly, my the end of my making and baking session I was too exhausted to write them down, but also because a lot has happened since. Wednesday evening was a special one for me, too, and I am just polishing off my dissertation, so my mind is tired. Here, though, is a very quick view of What Lizzie Got.

The biscuits were sweet, golden shortbread with chopped lavender in. I made a crisp rosewater sugar topping and wrapped them in baking parchment tied with red and white ribbon.

The dough was impossibly short, I was close to tears by the tenth time I’d tried, and failed, to cut out and lift a single disc. In the end, I kneaded in a quarter of a cup of flour and the same of ground almonds, and finally had a dough I could (just) handle. The rest is in the freezer waiting for me to stop sulking at it.

The pesto was easy enough, although you can see from this photo how tiny my mortar and pestle are. I had to chop the basil with the mezzaluna first, and grind the pine nuts separately, then stir them all together.

My sister loves pesto, and basil, so I knew this would be a hit. I’m amazed how strong home grown basil is – like lavender, it’s much more powerful.

The ketchup was lovely to make – I finely sliced and fried two onions and two cloves of garlic, added the spices, then a whole cereal bowl of my own tomatoes and a pack of chopped tomatoes. Added cider vinegar, sugar, salt and soy sauce, and let it boil down to a thick, rich sauce.

Getting it into the bottle was less easy, I had to make a funnel of baking parchment double up because, for no apparent reason, I don’t actually own a funnel.

Finally, though, it was done.

I doubt they’ll last long, but all the jars/bottles were sterilised in the oven just in case. The first thing Lizzie said when I arrived at their flat was ‘Oh, nice bag!’; she was thrilled to realise it was hers, and filled with goodies. I’m not very crafty so it was really satisfying to have a gift made up of things I’d made specially for her.

What always captures my heart, though, is American magic. Having laughed and sobbed my way through the utterly wonderful The Sky is Everywhere, I was quite prepared to believe that roses could cause anyone to fall in love, and that food made with sadness might taste like ash.

Magic and food are never far apart, and what really enticed me through Beautiful Creatures (lovely story, rubbish ending) was the food. I know very little about deep south cooking, so I turned to Mama Cherri’s Soul in a Bowl cookbook. It’s full of amazing recipes, from the perfect fluffy American pancakes to BBQ ribs that take four hours of hands-on cooking. The candied sweet potatoes with marshmallows were so good I considered offering my first born to the woman.

After a funny old weekend, I wanted sugary summery sweetness. Peaches nestled in sugar under a creamy, fluffy topping, crunch with demerara sugar. I had some strange, sadly un-gooey clotted cream to use up, so my cobbler recipe is a mixture of Mama Cherri’s, Nigel Slater’s, and my own. It was wonderful.

Peach Cobbler (serves two, or in my case, one for two peachy days)

For the fruit
3 ripe peaches
1 shot brandy (optional)
1 heaped tsp cornflour
30g butter
1 dessert spoon dark brown soft sugar
For the topping
125g flour
110g butter or 50g butter and 60g very thick cream
110g demerara sugar
2 heap tsp baking powder
1 egg

With a very sharp knife cut a cross into the bottom of each of the peaches. In a heatproof bowl cover with boiling water and leave for 2 minutes. Remove, allow to cool, and peel. Cut in half, remove the stone, and slice.

Into a saucepan put the peaches, sugar, cornflour and butter. Stir until the peaches are thoroughly coated in the cornflour, then add the brandy, stir and heat on a low to medium heat, stirring gently occasionally. Take off the heat when the sauce is thick and the peaches are softened.

While the peaches are heating, butter a pie dish or shallow baking dish. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Cream together the butter (and cream, if using) and demerara sugar.

Add the egg, then the flour and baking powder.

If, like me, you are lazy, you can just stir the whole lot together. You might find you work up the gluten in the flour and it becomes a bit stretchier than it should, but I didn’t notice this in the topping. You should have a sticky scone-like dough.

Pour the peaches into the pie dish and scoop blobs of the topping on. If you’re making it for others, you can make the cobbler dough thicker and roll it out, but I like mine rough and crisp and light, which means a little wonky and bumpy.

Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until golden and crisp and beautiful. Scoff happily with, preferably, lashings of cream.

For a girl with crippling SAD, a garden is a real sanctuary. Digging over the soil in crispy winter, smoky bonfires, the reward of a cup of steaming tea after preparing the ground. Breaking the frost to turn over dark, rich earth. The first seedlings uncurling their fat little leaves. The sun breaking over the new year’s garden. Spring, bird call and the first plants pricked out, new potting compost. Summer, long days in the sun. Tying up the tomatoes, leaning together the canes for peas, beans, and sweet peas. Home grown vegetables straight from the garden. Nothing gets you out in the sunshine like a garden growing, unfurling.

My garden is tiny, maybe 4m each way, but I have packed it full of plants and flowers, and still somehow left space for barbecues and relaxed evenings outside. This year I am growing:

• french beans
• beetroot
• tomatoes (Red Pear, Tigerella and Gardeners’ Delight)
• redcurrants
• strawberries
• carrots (full size and Chantenay)
• peas (normal and sugar snap)
• butternut squash
• courgettes
• miniature pumpkins
• blueberries (these are new and I got one whole berry this year!)
• gooseberries (stripped by caterpillars this year)
• potatoes
• turnips
• spinach
• lettuces

Plus herbs including, for the first time, basil. Everything is organic, though I must admit to giving up and spraying the poor, desperate acer with washing up liquid when blackfly arrived early in the year. Now it’s being climbed by wayward sweet peas and hops, but still doing surprisingly well. The sweet peas are wonderful, though my favourite, a peachy pink, have all disappeared, leaving me with white, lilac and this dark pink.

Beautiful, but a little traditional. The best thing about sweet peas is that the more you cut, the more flowers you get, so my kitchen is never without a bud vase full of scented sweet peas.

I also have a rose, gifted to us as a miniature flowering rose when we moved in here. I chucked it into the garden in a fit of desperation when it started to die off. It has grown spectacularly, sending long delicate branches out across the herb bed, but failed to flower. I cut it right back this winter, hacking back too the lemon balm, and digging out my beloved eucalyptus before it conquered Lancashire. The resulting bonfire smelled incredible, but though the rose has thrived, still no flowers.

I don’t bother with many flowers in the garden – a few lobelia, some white and pink geraniums, but I do have a real weakness for lavender. The bees love it, and we have plenty of little orange-bottomed bumblebees that make the loveliest high-pitched hum, as though singing to themselves as they bob between the flowers. I have been trying to catch a good photo for weeks, and this obliging bee posed just perfectly for me in the sun today.

In the past we’ve had what looked like mason bees, dipping into holes in the sandy pit that in wetter times acts as a run-off for the garden. This year the sandy pit has become part of the new curcubit bed, for courgettes, mini pumpkins, and butternut squash. Sadly, no more mason bees, but some beautiful yellow flowers, and excitingly little fat green butternut squashes. They are one of my favourite foods, I’m planning them roasted, in soup, in bakes and even breads and cakes.

The best thing about the sunshine reappearing is that my tomatoes will ripen. I promised myself, after the sodden, soggy disaster of last year that I wouldn’t bother with tomatoes this year. Too heartbreaking, to watch them swell on the vine and burst in the rain, all that time and energy wasted.

Of course, I couldn’t resist. First, a seed from one of last year’s somehow crept into my spinach tray. After all that dedication, I couldn’t very well dig him out, could I? Then, since I was growing one tomato, I thought I might as well have a few more. I have six tomato plants in pots, and three in the ground where yet more seeds from the burst tomatoes have self seeded. One is in the hanging basket, and is doing surprisingly well. They are all rather green still, because we have had so little sun this month, but the Tigerellas are starting to ripen.

The Red Pear tomatoes, miniature plum toms, are looking very fat, and there are tonnes on the plant, but I need a real burst of sunshine for them.

A couple of weeks of real baking heat, enough to warm the fence behind them and the concrete slabs underneath, would do nicely. It would be perfect, too, for my rescued strawberry plant. This little fighter was reduced at Wilkinson’s. Wrinkled and sad and dry in its pot, it was supposed to be a perpetual fruiter, but never really took in the garden. During the big winter cull this year, I dug it out, and stuck it in a pot. At some point either myself or Lizzie, my sister, upturned the orange builders’ bucket we use to lug things about, over the plant. There it sat out the long, snowy winter, and come spring it was covered in right new leaves.

I split it into three plants, and in a moment of rare creativity knocked two holes into the sides of an old grey office bin. Filled with compost and planted up, it made a perfectly reasonable strawberry planter. Now the plants are thriving. I’ve already had one good showing of little fat strawberries. I got back from my weekend away on Sunday evening and found two huge ripe strawbs, which were too delicious to photograph. Scoffed with clotted cream, they were perfect. Now the plants have maybe thirty strawberries waiting to ripen, and more flowers on them. I like to think it’s thanking us for giving it a second, and third, chance. Roll on a last burst of summer, with organic, home grown strawberries.

marmalade bread and butter pudding

This is a leftovers recipe, so feel free to alter the quantities to suit. As usual, I was half out of eggs so I’ve substituted a little custard powder. I used the leftovers of a lardy cake made to the recipe from the cookbook I’ve been working on at uni. During the recipe testing we accidentally used wholemeal flour and while it was lovely, I couldn’t stop worrying that we hadn’t actually tested the proper recipe. As I was using lardy cake, which unsurprisingly contains lard, I didn’t add any butter to the recipe when I made it. Any leftover bread would be fine, but I though the home made denseness really suited the recipe.

I used lovely seville orange marmalade made by my Mum. I’ll have to remember to encourage her to make more. It was lovely, dark and bitter and with that particular soft jelly texture that stands marmalade apart from jam.

Ingredients
Half a loaf of bread, preferably slightly stale
50g butter
75g brown sugar
200g mixed dried fruit – if your mix doesn’t include mixed peel, add about 25g
2tsp cinnamon
1tsp mixed spice
1 egg yolk
500ml milk
1tbsp custard powder
2-3tbsp tangy marmalade

Preheat the oven to 150, and lightly grease a baking dish around 20-25cm diameter. Cut your leftover bread into thick slices, 3-4 cm thick. Spread them with the butter. Place into a baking dish, overlapping the slices. Stir together the mixed fruit, sugar and spice. Reserve 1 1/2tbsps of the mixture. Sprinkle the rest evenly over the bread. In a cup or small bowl, stir together the custard powder with a little of the milk until completely smooth. Add to the rest of the milk, and beat in the egg yolk.

Pour the custard over the bread, making sure all the bread has been coated. Roughly spread over the marmalade.

Sprinkle over the remaining sugar, spice and fruit. Bake for 45-50 minutes, until golden and crispy. Serve hot.

This would serve four hungry people well: to save me from myself I froze most of it in portions.